Should I sell on Amazon Kindle or create a PDF?

Is your audience as large as Amazon’s?

Of course it’s not. But how many people will you reach through each channel? Or rather, how many potential, actual buyers will you reach through each channel.

Why not do both?

Both sounds like a good idea, right? Why not? Get the best of both worlds: your intimate audience and the global reach of Amazon.

Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) has a program called KDP Select where you are choosing to only publish through Amazon. So that means exclusively at Amazon, not on your website, not at Barnes & Noble, not anywhere else (digitally, at least, as far as I understand).

Note that at this point, I don’t know what to choose. One, the other, or both. Ask me again in a year (or less?) when I have done one or both or none. I like posting about things that I don’t know, it reminds me that I don’t know and that I need to figure it out.

There will be several things to think about when making this decision.

Audience

But Amazon is so big, how is anyone going to find you? Yes, there’s that. But it’s the same with your site: if you don’t already have a following, it’s going to take a while to build one. With Amazon, there’s already traffic there, looking for books and, ideally, looking for the types of books that you’re writing.

” … many people visit Amazon directly with the specific intention of purchasing an e-book. — Why Publish on Kindle?, SiteSell Blog.

It’s an excellent point. It’s a bit like setting up an, I don’t know, bathing suit shop on a random street versus setting up a shop in or near a swimming pool. People are there to swim. At Amazon, people are visiting to read and to buy.

Pricing

Do you price the products the same? Amazon likes prices between $0.99 and $9.99. What if you’d like to target a higher price class? Can you change different prices on different sites? Probably not a great idea.

Accessibility

Amazon makes it ridiculously easy to purchase an ebook and let the reader be reading within seconds. If they have an account all set up with payment methods and Kindles attached, it’s even easier and faster. Keep in mind that this means fewer and smaller barriers to buying your book.

If you have a PDF, sure, if they’re tech savvy, it’s easy to buy a PDF and start reading it. Pay, download, read it on whatever device you’d like.